The Weekly Brief

The recommended fee this week was about 1 satoshi per byte, which is effectively the minimum the network accepts. Moving coins from an exchange to a wallet you hold costs about $0.11. Combining five small pieces of Bitcoin into one costs about $0.28.

There were still about 50,403 transactions waiting, nearly the same as last week. A long line with a cheap fee might sound backwards, so here's the short version: most of that line is people who also chose the cheapest rate and are content to wait. Nobody is pushing to the front, so the front stays cheap.

If you've been holding small amounts from years of exchange purchases, this is the kind of week when combining them costs less than a cup of coffee. Do it from a wallet you control, and do it on a quiet evening, not in a hurry.

One plain caution, every time I mention cheap fees: a cheap week is a good time to do maintenance, not a reason to do anything with your savings that you weren't already planning. Fees are about moving what you have, not about what to buy.

The table below is our usual $50-a-week buyer, never selling. This week every row slipped a little, and I'll show each one.

Over one year, 53 purchases of $50.00 add up to $2,650.00. Today that's worth about $2,789.25, up about 5.3%, at an average cost of about $76,090.62 a coin. The one-year lump sum is down about 28.3%. That gap is the whole argument for a steady habit, and I'd rather show it again than pretend it's new.

The two-year row is still red, and a little redder than last week. $5,250.00 invested is worth about $4,900.63, down about 6.7%, a loss of about three hundred fifty dollars. The average cost over those two years is about $85,798.54, above today's price. That is the third straight week this row has printed a loss. I said I'd keep printing it either way, and I will.

Three years turned $7,850.00 into about $8,770.85, up about 11.7%. Five years turned $13,050.00 into about $24,368.45, up about 86.7%. Ten years turned $26,100.00 into about $269,612.40. Those longer rows lived through some ugly stretches, and they describe the past, not a promise about the next ten.

Here's what connects this section to the lead. Every one of those rows assumes the coins were still there at the end. A ten-year habit is only worth what the last step protects. The quiet discipline of buying a little every week and the quiet discipline of checking your backup once are really the same virtue. Neither is exciting, and both are the difference between a plan and a hope.

Every week I set Bitcoin next to the plain option.

Over the past year, prices rose about 3.7%, so it takes about $10,371.73 today to buy what $10,000 bought a year ago. The money supply grew about 4.9%. Bitcoin fell about 28.3%. For the past twelve months, dollars in savings held their value far better, and I'm saying that plainly.

I want to point at the three-year row, because it changed a lot this week and nothing dramatic happened. Last week that row showed Bitcoin worth nearly three times its price from three years earlier. This week it's up about 134.5%. Most of that drop isn't this week's price at all. It's that the starting line moved. Three years ago this week, Bitcoin was in the middle of a sharp climb, trading near $34,157.79, well above where the window started a week earlier. Slide the window one week and the answer changes by a lot.

That's worth understanding, because people quote these numbers as if they were facts about the asset. They're really facts about the asset and the starting date. When anyone, me included, shows you a return, it's fair to ask: starting when?

Over five years, prices rose about 21.6%, so $10,000 then needs about $12,160.48 now, and Bitcoin is up about 27.0% over the same span. Over ten years, a dollar lost about 28.1% of what it could buy.

The inflation and money supply figures come from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, right here in town.

And the guardrail, every week: I'm not telling anyone to move savings into Bitcoin. Keep your emergency fund in dollars. Keep money you'll need this year in dollars. This section is here to help you understand what a dollar does over time, not to tell you where to put one.

Two wallet apps shipped updates in the past ten days: Ledger Live 4.25.0, four days ago, and Trezor Suite 26.10.2, five days ago. If you use either, update from inside the app or by typing the company's website into your browser yourself, never from a link in an email or a sponsored search result. Scammers know exactly when these updates go out, and fake "urgent update" emails tend to follow. No relevant FBI fraud alerts this week.

This week's topic, covered in the lead: practice your recovery before you need it. A few practical notes for when you sit down to do it.

Do it somewhere private, with no phone camera pointed at the table and no smart speaker in the room. Never type your words into a website, a phone note, or a computer that isn't the wallet itself. Anyone asking you to enter your recovery words online is trying to take your money, every single time.

If you'd rather not reset the device holding your savings, restore your words into a second wallet that holds only a trivial amount, and confirm the first receiving address matches. Either way, when you're finished, the paper goes back where it was, and you can finally trust it instead of hoping.

For churches and nonprofits, the drill should involve more than one person. If only one volunteer can restore the organization's wallet, the organization doesn't really hold the keys, that volunteer does. Write down who does the test, when, and who witnessed it.

Scripture talks about counting the cost before building the tower, so you aren't caught halfway with nothing to finish it. A recovery test is a small version of that. It's asking, before the day comes, whether you really have what you need to finish.